


Torchwood WWII

by MrProphet



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 17:04:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10701333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	1. Lucy Jones

Lucy Jones  
Torchwood, Drama, T

_Tobruk, October 1940_

Eighteen hours. Washing, bandaging and setting bones; dispensing medicines; diagnosing. Eighteen hours, doing all the things that the doctors should have been taking care of, and doing them better than any of those  _men_  could ever have managed. Sister Lucy Jones slumped in a chair in the nurses room and fumbled with her lighter.

After the third time she failed to strike a flame, a lighter snapped open in front of her in a man's hand. She leaned forward and touched the tip of her cigarette to the flame. She leaned back and looked the man over. Her grey eyes flickered nonchalantly up and down his body, then went back for a more leisurely stroll.

“Well, you're not a nurse,” she drawled, “although you do look good in uniform.”

The man grinned. “I could say the same about you,” he assured her. “Captain Jack Harkness.”

“Sister Lucy Jones.” She stood and took his proffered hand in a firm grip. “Glad to meet you, Captain Jack Harkness.”

“Likewise. Word is, you're the one to talk to in this hospital if you want to know what's really going on.”

Lucy took a long drag on her cigarette and tried not to look too flattered. “The word may be right,” she admitted.

“I'm looking for a soldier.”

Lucy sat back down with a chuckle. “Aren't we all, darling.”

“I don't mean like that,” Captain Jack replied. “Not just at the moment, anyway. I need to find a particular soldier; an old soldier. One who hangs on when he really shouldn't.”

Lucy met his gaze. “You're one to talk,” she noted. “I know the man you mean, though. Come with me.” She stubbed out her cigarette and led the way out of the nurses room. She passed quickly though the crowded wards of enlisted men and up the stairs to officer's country: better beds, more space, more qualified doctors; prettier nurses.

“Sister Barker is in charge of the officers' wards. She can be a bit of a dragon,” Lucy noted.

Captain Jack straightened his coat. “Better let me go first,” he suggested.

Lucy smiled pityingly. “Sorry, darling, but that won't work with Barker. Wait here; I won't be long.” She turned and swayed through the doors.

Almost an hour later, she swayed out. “A total dragon,” she sighed.

“You said you wouldn't be long.”

“Well, if a thing's worth doing...” Lucy grinned. “Come on handsome, and don't look so down. If no-one was immune to your charm, where would the spice be when they weren't?”

“A physician and a philosopher,” Captain Jack noted.

Lucy laughed and pressed a fierce kiss on his mouth. “That's not all I am,” she assured him. “Now come on, handsome.”

The Major was not a very old man, but he had clearly lived too long. He had scars on his scars from a hundred wounds, all of which should have been mortal. Lucy had seen him come in and known then that he should have been dead for a long time. Inside, he already was; his eyes were hollow, devoid of brightness, and even Sister Barker was afraid of him.

“Hey there, Major,” Captain Jack called. “You've led us quite a dance. Still got it on you, I see; still going strong despite all the world can throw at you.”

The Major looked up with his black eyes. “You don't know what you're talking about,” he spat.

“Oh, I think he does,” Lucy murmured.

The Major reared up in bed and grabbed for Jack's throat. Captain Jack fought back fiercely, one hand scrabbling for something inside the Major's shirt.

Suddenly, Captain Jack stumbled back and fell, a knife jutting from his chest. He pulled the blade free, but fell lifeless on the floor of the ward.

“No-one can kill me,” the Major croaked. “No-one!”

Lucy stepped forward without a word and reached into his nightshirt. She felt something hard and metallic jutting out of his flesh and wrenched at it with all her strength. With a sudden, horrid sucking sound, an eight-inch iron spike ripped free of the Major's flesh.

“Is that so?” Lucy asked.

“No!” the Major reached out for the spike, but his hollow eyes clouded and he slumped down, dead.

“An Ixon spine.” 

“Jesus!” Lucy sun around in horror.

“Very nasty,” Jack went on. “Feeds on death to keep you alive; hence the military career and the reputation for death or glory charges; he would have needed lots of casualties to keep going, the way he lived.”

“And what about you?” Lucy wondered. “You really should be dead this time.”

He shrugged. “I really should have been dead lots of times.”

Lucy looked around at the mess of bloodstains and the Major's corpse. “This is going to be tough to explain,” she sighed.

Jack shrugged. “Relax. We'll take care of it.”

“And who is we?”

Jack winked at her. “You want to find out, Sister Lucy Jones?” He held out a hand. “Then come with me.”


	2. Losses

“Do you know how many bombs were dropped on the British Isles during the whole of World War II?” Captain Jack Harkness asked.

Sister Lucy Jones sighed. “No, Jack,” she admitted, “and you really shouldn’t tell us.”

“Actually, I don’t know,” Jack admitted. “Statistics were never my strong suit. I do know that of the however many ‘devices’ of one sort or another that made their way down, four-hundred-and-eight were actually alien spacecraft, of which only three-hundred-and-seventy-six took off again; the dangers of using a massive bombing campaign as radar cover. What’ve we got, Doc?”

“I think it’s safe to move around, Jack,” Dr Jena Hansen called up. “Just watch out for any smaller devices. Even a secondary charge would rip your body in two.”

“Oh, you have other plans for my body then?” Jack teased.

“At the appropriate time,” Hansen scolded playfully. “Okay; I think we’re alright to get to work now,” she said. “There’s no magnetism in the casing, no electric current, and the road is near enough that a trembler would have gone off by now; we can cut in without serious danger of anything exploding.”

“Right,” Jack agreed. “Lucy, switch on the generator, then you and Jena get right back; don’t want you standing near if it goes off.”

“Be careful,” Jena insisted.

“He’ll be fine,” Lucy assured her. “God, you’re such a mother hen; always clucking around him. Or something like that.”

Jena blushed bright red. “Lucy Jones, you are worse than a soldier!” she snapped. “You’re worse than…” She tried to come up with the worst thing she could think of and finally nodded towards their colleague: “than him.”

“You know you love it,” Lucy teased.

Working quickly and rather regretfully tuning out the banter, Jack cut a hole in the bomb’s casing. Once inside it was an easy matter to defuse the device – an advantage of time travel was the ability to make an extensive study of WWII German bomb designs, as well as where the bombs  _weren’t_  going to fall, before your first visit – and remove the core.

“We’re lucky this didn’t go off,” he told his colleagues, holding up the core. “The one and only Vergeltungsbombe to reach Britain without the core detonating in flight.”

“What is this?” Jena asked, taking the core from Jack’s fingers. It looked like a piece of coral, but it was oddly warm and slick to the touch. She cried out in alarm as her hand suddenly shrivelled up, the skin withering and wrinkling.

“It’s a fragment of the organo-mathematical core from a time travel capsule,” Jack replied, gently taking it back. “Time flows back and forth across it in weird ways.” Carefully he reversed the fragment and held it under Jena’s hand; after a moment, the skin fleshed out and regained its healthy tone. “Beautiful as ever,” he promised her, delicately kissing her fingertips.

Jena blushed.

“How does that make it useful in a weapon?” Lucy demanded curtly.

“It doesn’t; not very,” Jack admitted, slipping the fragment into his pocket. “But it contains energy, so the Nazis thought they’d have a go at smashing it. The V-bomb uses a set of high-explosive charges to supercompress the core fragment, causing it to rupture. They had enough material for five bombs.”

“And the other four blew up in flight?” Jena asked.

“Let me guess,” Lucy said. “The fragment jumped the detonators forward to the time of impact?”

Jack nodded. “In the air, all you get is a squadron of missing fighter planes; I know when three of them went to, but the fourth is a mystery,” he added. “On the ground… Well, you  _might_  shoot Coventry back to the stone age, or run it forward to the late twenty-second century and then it’s nothing but Daleks.”

“Nothing but what?”

Jack cupped Jena’s face with his hand and kissed her. “Oh, Jena; I pray you never find out.” After a moment he stood back and shoo his head. “Anyway, this was the last of them; we put it into storage until we have something we can use to study it.”

“And that’s it?” Lucy asked. “We came all this way for one piece of time coral? Don’t we have local offices for this?”

Jack patted his pocket. “We didn’t come for this. We came for that.” He pointed along the street.

“I like your ambition, Jack,” Jena said, “but we’ll never fit that into the Hub.”

Jack shook his head. “We’re not collecting; we’re just visiting.”

Lucy laughed. “We’re taking some time out to visit a cathedral?”

Jack sighed. “Well, we’re not going to have another chance,” he said.


	3. The Beast

_April 1944_

Three days west of Cape Town, the Royal Navy destroyers  _HMS Warlord_ ,  _HMS Kelpie_  and  _HMS Polyxena_  were heading into dangerous waters. The South Atlantic was the scene for a deadly game of cat and mouse between Allied convoys and German u-boats, German convoys and Allied submarines, and also for extended struggles of patience and positioning between warships of both sides. 

Many of these battles were won and lost not so much on the water as in the code breaking rooms of Bletchley and their German counterparts. It was the cryptographic workers of Station X who had produced the report that had sent the destroyer task group to a rendezvous at Cape Town, where four passengers boarded  _HMS Warlord_  with sealed orders. The decoded message, which had been shown only to Commander Simon Caine of  _Warlord_ , had been sent by a German u-boat commander and read simply:

_Send reinforcements for Wolf Pack 119 soonest. Something is destroying my boats._

“What the hell is this?” Caine had demanded at once.

“Sorry; need to know,” the leader of the newcomers had assured him with a bright grin. “Just head to those coordinates and then open your sealed orders.”

“And who are you?” Caine looked over the team rather doubtfully. “Are the RAF sending women into combat now?”

“We’re not RAF,” the man replied. “I just took a fancy to the uniform in my volunteer days. We’re Torchwood.”

“Oh, great,” Caine groaned.

*

Three days out,  _Kelpie_  sighted wreckage. On investigation, it proved to be the remains of the for’ard section of a Type XXI U-Boat. The Torchwood team were lowered in a boat to investigate, while the crews of the three destroyers remained on watch, and on high alert.

Sergeant Hector ‘Archie’ Andrews rowed the boat towards the wreck with long, powerful strokes of the oars, while his team mates gazed ahead. The prow nudged aside flotsam and jetsam, including the occasional body part. Sister Lucy Jones fished out a limb – an arm, it looked like, although it was rather bloated – and examined it with her usual icy calm.

“The bone is splintered; twisted off,” she suggested.

Dr Jena Hansen contemplated the wreckage through a telescope. “I hate to say it, but so was the front of the submarine. Jack… this wasn’t done by a torpedo, nor by a… what was it again? Laser?”

Captain Jack Harkness nodded. “That’s what I was worried about,” he admitted. “I never like it when they talk about ‘something’.”

Hansen set down the telescope and reached for her pack. She dipped water out of the sea into sample bottles and examined it. A layer of an oily chemical lay on top of the sea water. “What is this?” she wondered. “Do you think the  _Warlord_  has the facilities to analyse it?”

“In your hands, Jena, I’m sure of it.”

Lucy shook her head. “I’m holding the severed and bloated arm of a dead German submariner, but it’s you two who make me sick,” she declared.

*

 _Warlord_  was not overly equipped with scientific equipment and Jena was forced to rely on her own small field kit and considerable ingenuity. She had a number of sophisticated devices – impossibly sophisticated in fact, coming from places far beyond any earthly science – in her bag, but the bulk of her alien gear was back at the Core in London. Rules were rules and only a limited number of Torchwood’s alien devices were permitted to leave the safe-keeping of the secure facilities in London, Glasgow and Cardiff.

“What is that?” Lucy demanded.

Jena looked over her shoulder. The nurse was leaning on the door frame, her “It's a Mendelian helix analyser,” Jena replied.

Lucy frowned doubtfully. “We've got a Mendelian helix analyser at the Core; it's eighteen inches long with a... twirly bit. This is six metal food trays and about a quart of” - she sniffed - “the worst home brewed alcohol I have ever encountered.”

“The alcohol provides a base for the chemicals,” Jena explained, indicating an array of cleaning materials and a scatter of emptied cartridges. “And yes, but the one at the Core was made in an alien manufactory, not the galley of an RN destroyer in the South Atlantic. It's the best I can do,” she admitted.

“It’s not bad, considering that according to Jack no-one even discovers the Mendelian helix within the nuclein for... ten years.”

“Well, I have an advantage,” Jena huffed.

“But never to be recognised for your genius,” Lucy chuckled. “Jack wants to know what you've got.”

“Give me time,” Jena insisted. “Just...” She reached into one of the dishes and withdrew a piece of paper. “There. Let's go.”

*

“That's not a DNA chain,” Jack argued.

“I realise...”

“DNA does not dance,” he insisted.

“And yet,” Jena noted quietly. “It's twisting, reshaping itself, and not just rearranging but radically altering its own structure.”

"Oo, oo!” Lucy raised a hand. “Can I say it?”

“It's my turn,” Archie complained.

“Arm wrestle you for it?”

Archie grumbled, but gave way.

“But that's impossible!” Lucy protested.

Jack and Jena looked up from the table. “We've actually moved on,” Jack told her. “To this.” He held up a test tube, in which the sample of slime wriggled and oozed.

Lucy pointed and stared. “And we started with the pictures of Mendelian helices because...?”

“It seemed important to understand the underlying principles,” Jena argued.

“The slime is moving!” Archie interrupted.

Jack looked at Lucy and shrugged. “And that's why you should let him say these things,” he said. “Yes, Archie; this is not a slime residue from the creature that sank the submarine. The submarine was torn in half by slime.”

“That slime can tear steel?” Archie asked.

“I know it seems unlikely...” Jena began.

“I'll believe anything these days,” Archie assured her, “But you're keeping steel-tearing slime in a glass tube.”

Jena looked down at the tube in her hand. Jack reached out and snatched it away from her, turning his back just as the tube cracked and shattered, spraying glass into his face.

“It's making a run for it!” Archie grabbed a metal bucket and threw himself across the floor, slamming the bucket down on top of the slime. The bucket bucked and twitched, scraped across the floor dragging and then split as the slime punched a hole through it. It oozed out and reared up in front of Archie with a monstrous piping, whistling noise.

Jena stepped forward and emptied a flask over the slime. It hissed, steamed, whistled shrilly and vaporised.

“Nasty,” Lucy whispered.

“Heavily alkali; the slime is caustic, acidic.”

“I meant in general,” Lucy admitted.

“That whistling,” Archie said.

“Yes; I don't know how it made that noise,” Jena admitted.

Jack stood up, picking the glass out of his hand. “That's not what he means.”

“I can still hear the whistling,” Archie agreed. “From... all around.”

Jack turned his head, listening. “On deck!” he snapped.

They trooped onto the for'ard deck of the destroyer. The whistling, piping cries filled the air, louder than the foghorns on the destroyers.

“What the hell is that?” Caine demanded, striding towards them. “What...?”

With a tortured shriek of metal, the  _Kelpie_  buckled and bent almost in half. The magazine exploded, hurling broken hull plates across the water. For a moment it looked as though the attack must have been a Pyrrhic victory, but then the cry went up again, hooting in triumph.

_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_

“Sound general quarters!” Caine ordered. “Get me range and ready the damned guns!”

Jack stared across the water. He swallowed hard and said: “We're going to need a bigger boat.”


	4. Madness Lies

Crippled and floundering, overloaded with survivors from her sister ships, the  _HMS Warlord_  beached on the edge of an ice floe. Despite almost twenty minutes of shelling and torpedo fire from the  _Warlord_  and the  _Polyxena_ , before it too was torn open and sunk, shreds of the amorphous organism that destroyed  _Kelpie_  continued to move in the water. They clung to the sailors who were rescued by the crew of  _Warlord_  until Jena produced a batch of her alkali solution. 

After an hour, when the last survivors were dragged aboard, Archie noticed that the slime was beginning to reconstitute. “It’s also thronging around the ship,” he noted.

“How bad is that, Jena?” Jack asked.

“It… Ah,” Jena replied. “Well, it is acidic.”

They dumped as much alkali as possible over the sides of the ship, but the damage was done and there was nothing for it but to send out an SOS and make for the nearest land, which unfortunately was not so much land as ice.

They beached on the pack ice in Amundsen bay and quickly abandoned the foundering  _Warlord_. A trail of slime led out in the destroyer’s wake.

“If there are any more of them, they’ll know where to find us,” Jack warned. “We should move inland, then head west for the British base on Ross Island.”

“There is no base on Ross Island,” Commander Caine argued.

“Well, yes; if anyone asks that is exactly the right answer,” Jack agreed with a grin. “Archie; get the gear together on the sleds. Jena; make sure our kit is all alright. Lucy; see to the wounded and make sure we’ve got plenty to keep us warm.”

Lucy gave a crooked grin. “Three hundred sailors on an ice floe?” she asked. “I don’t know about the others, but you and I’ll be alright.”

“Behave yourself, Lucy Jones,” Jack cautioned her.

“Like that’s going to happen,” she laughed, drawing her coat more tightly around her as she sauntered away to attend to the cold weather gear.

“What was that, Captain Harkness?” Commander Caine demanded.

“Classified,” Jack replied.

“Don’t give me that!” Caine snapped. “That thing soaked up all I could throw at it and kept coming. Three ships and almost three hundred good men were lost under my command. Don’t tell me that you don’t know how that feels,” he added.

“I won’t,” Jack assured him. “As for what that was… I don’t rightly know. I think… not of this Earth, not of this time. Something ancient and alien.”

“You’re mad,” Caine accused. “Or I am.”

Jack grinned. “Oh, it gets better,” he said. “Because if I’m remembering aright, there’s only one place that thing can have come from; a city, older than prehistory, buried beneath a line of uncharted mountains discovered more than thirty years ago by a research expedition from Miskatonic University. 

“And Ross Island is on the far side of those mountains.”


	5. Saving Private R'zann

_The Netherlands,  
September 17th 1944_

The muffled stutter of silenced gunfire faded away, leaving only the low hum of gravitic stabilisers to break the silence. Bodies littered the floor, surrounding the low, metallic dome which hovered just above the ground. After a moment, four figures broke cover and moved towards the centre of the chamber.

Dr Jena Hansen gingerly stepped over a white-coated corpse. “Did you have to?” she asked. Like her comrades she carried a De Lisle silenced carbine, but the barrel of her weapon was cold.

“Told you not to bring her,” Sister Lucy Jones noted. She bent down beside one of the wounded and finished him off with a quick, precise dagger-thrust.

Jena scowled at Lucy.

“Jena is not an option on this, Lucy,” Captain Jack Harkness replied. “I only wish you had been,” he added, addressing Jena. “And yes, we had to. This part of history is in constant flux; the temporal rubberneckers but enough strain on the fabric of time, even without the various group who choose to try and intervene in this particular episode.  _Any_  knowledge of this technology could result in a catastrophic shift in the course of the war, even at this late stage.”

“I understand that,” Jena agreed sadly. “I just wish…”

“I know,” Jack agreed. “Take a look at the ship; see if we can make it fly. Lucy, find our pilot. Archie; get out there and organise the lads. I want a secure perimeter and lots of warning in case of company.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Hector ‘Archie’ Andrews agreed. He shifted the weight of his heavy pack and left the main chamber.

“Sister Lucy, where do we stand?” Jack asked.

“About a hundred miles northwest of nowhere,” Lucy replied, calling back from one of the smaller labs. “Files; lots of files,” she explained.

“Firebomb,” Jack ordered. He checked another of the side rooms himself; it had been set up as a staff canteen. Jack checked under the tables and behind the chairs, but there was no-one there. The toilets, similarly, were empty.

“I don’t think I’m going to get this thing airborne,” Jena told him as he emerged. “The propulsion system seems alright, but the power plant is badly damaged; it’s leaking radiation as is and trying to increase the yield will only make things worse. We’ll have to load it up and drive it back to Arnhem, but there’s a hoist all set up and…”

“No,” Jack interrupted. “Go grab Archie; tell him we need to set charges.”

“But, Jack…”

“I don’t have time to argue, Jena!”

Jena put her hands on her hips. “Well, you’d better make time!” she declared.

Lucy paused in a doorway. “Are you two going to fight?” she asked hopefully.

“Pilot,” Jack ordered. “I’m sorry, Jena, but we don’t have time to drive this thing anywhere. The British lose the bridge at Arnhem in four days time and the fighting is fierce. We’re doing this on foot or not at all.”

“Lose the bridge?” Jena was horrified. “But Market Garden…”

“Total bust,” Jack sighed. “I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t change the way the war is run, but this” – he gestured around them – “is something I  _can_  take part in. I’m sorry, really, but if it won’t fly we have to destroy it.”

Jena nodded sadly.

“Last door!” Lucy called. She pushed it open and ducked back as a bullet whined against the frame. “Looks good.”

Jack nodded. “Get Archie,” he told Jena.

“Alright.”

Jack touched her hand briefly and then hurried over to Lucy. “What’ve we got?”

Lucy unslung her De Lisle and cocked it. “At least one enemy, taking cover behind a table; Luger or a Walther. If you put a couple of shots over her head…”

“Slow down, Tiger!” Jack chided. “We don’t want to catch the pilot in a crossfire. Let me try something, and try not to kill this one. If they were working with the pilot, we might need to talk to them first.”

“But…”

“Ready?”

“Well…”

Jack stepped out into the doorway. He caught sight of blonde hair and blue eyes behind the muzzle flare as he advanced. He felt the bullets slam against his torso, hard as fists even through the flak jacket. One bullet creased his cheek and another found a weakness and punched through his shoulder. He slumped against the wall, bleeding freely, and was barely aware of Lucy leaping past him.

He came to in a rush, his recovery sudden and total enough that he knew he must have died. He pushed himself up and looked around. Lucy was standing over a terrified young woman, while a thin, blue creature lay on a gurney nearby.

“Okay, Jones; what’ve we got?” Jack demanded.

“She says she’s a local doctor,” Lucy replied, “drafted in to treat a prisoner of war. This was the prisoner.”

“R’zann of Tharis,” the woman added quickly and in broken German. “He is good man, sir.”

Jack looked the woman over. “Dutch?” he asked in Dutch.

She nodded eagerly. “Yes.”

“Okay; well, we’re not here to hurt you, Miss…”

“Uttë van Loewen,” she replied at once.

“Captain Jack Harkness. Good to meet you, Uttë van Loewen.”

“Oh!” Lucy exclaimed. She switched back to English. “Oh, no you did not!”

“What?”

“Even you have to draw a line somewhere before flirting with someone you’re about to kill,” Lucy insisted.

“I do,” Jack assured her. “No German survivors; Dutch is okay. After all, who’s she going to tell?”

Lucy shook her head. “You’re as soft as Jena,” she accused, but for once she sounded relieved.

“Oh, I wish. Anyway, the pilot looks in a bad way. You may need her help. See what you can do while I check on the others.”

“Right.”

Out of the infirmary, Jack hurried back to the perimeter, which was being held by ten soldiers of the 1st Airborne Division. He quickly located their leader, Sergeant Tom Evans, a dour Welshman.

“Keep the perimeter secure, but be ready to move out at short notice,” Jack ordered. “We’ll fall back and cross the Rhine at Driel.”

“Our orders were to retreat via Arnhem, sir,” Evans noted.

“I know, but the forces there will be surrounded before we can reach them.”

“Sir?”

“And no, we can’t move up in support. We’re too few and our mission is too important.”

“With respect, sir, my commanding officer…”

“Sergeant, you’ve seen my clearance?”

“Well… no, sir.”

“Right. Scary isn’t it.”

Evans barely blinked. “Driel it is, sir.”

“Good man.”

Jack hurried back to the labs and found a scene of chaos.

“Hey!” he snapped. The room fell silent. “Archie; how’s it going?”

“Charges set, sir, but Dr Hansen won’t let me attach the detonator.”

“R’zann is dying, sir,” Lucy jumped in. “Hansen wants to use the ship’s distress beacon to signal for rescue, but if we do that…”

“We’ve lost everything  _anyway_ ,” Jena insisted. “We’re blowing up the ship and the pilot is dying; why not just let this one go.”

Jack sighed. “Lucy; is there anything…?”

Lucy shook her head. “Uttë is with him still, but she really doesn’t know enough about his biology and I’m completely new to it. There’s nothing we can do except make him more – or less – comfortable in his final hours.”

Jack hung his head and closed his eyes in thought. 

“Jack,” Jena whispered. “You know what’s right.”

“Alright,” he said at last. “Put the pilot inside and trigger the beacon. Clear the charges, Archie, and let’s collect up all the notes we can before Lucy’s firebombs go off. I want everyone clear in five.”

*

The team and their escort moved away across the Dutch countryside. Behind them a spear of light stabbed out of the sky and began to peel open the laboratory building.

“What the hell is that, Sarge?” one of the soldiers asked.

“If you take my advice, lad, you didn’t see anything,” Evans replied.

“Not our finest hour,” Lucy noted sourly.

“Oh, I don’t know. We got to do a good thing for once.” Jack shrugged. “And if we don’t have the ship, neither do the Nazis.”

“I wish I had your optimism,” Lucy sighed.

Jack clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Just keep an eye on van Loewen for me.”

“A pleasure,” Lucy assured him. She moved away and Jena eased up alongside Jack.

“She’s incorrigible,” she noted.

“A lot of that about,” Jack replied. “Thanks.”

“For nagging?”

“For being our conscience. It’s something we could use more of in Torchwood.”


	6. Love's Labour's Lost

Captain Jack Harkness clambered up the wall of safe deposit lockers, desperately cecking every inch of the seal. “There must be a release mechanism somewhere,” he insisted. “An emergency catch.”

“There isn’t.” Jena Hansen carefully folded her coat and set it down on the floor.

“We don’t know that!”

“We do,” she assured him. “I went over the plans very carefully, Jack.” She pulled two bottles of water and a long roll of tubing from her bag.

“If I can set off a fire alarm...”

“No-one is watching the alarms, and the fire would use up oxygen,” Jena replied. “This room is... fifteen feet long, ten wide and ten high. Fifteen hundred cubic feet. Could be better.”

“Jena...”

“Oxygen consumption isn’t an issue, but CO2 build up is. We’re going to hit toxic levels in... Let’s say three percent... Twenty-two hours.”

“I’m going to get you out of here!” Jack insisted.

“No, Jack. What you’re going to do is tip the numbers. If you keep shouting and scrambling around, you’re going to create more CO2; we won’t last fourteen hours.” Jena crumbled lime into the water, then clipped tubing and moulded small lumps of children’s clay into bungs. She held one of the two out to Jack. “Come here, lie down and breathe through this. The water and chalk will dissolve and hold the CO2; we might last as much as two days, although we’ll lose some when we sleep.”

Jack felt his heart break. “No-one will find us for days.”

“Lucy might,” Jena offered in a trembling voice. “Anyway; this is our only chance. We can’t get out.” She lay down with her head on the coat and put a tube in her mouth. The water bubbled with each exhalation.

“I’m sorry, Jena,” Jack said. “I never should have gotten you involved in Torchwood. You never belonged here.”

Jena smiled softly and removed the tube. “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“Jena, I...”

“Can’t even say it now? It’s okay, Jack. I know about the other women, and the men; well, some of them. If I was possessive, you’d have known it by now, and if I was here for you, I’d have left long ago.”

“Still...”

“Jack. You’re wasting air.”

Jack folded his coat and lay down beside Jena.

That was how Lucy Jones found them, four days later.


	7. The Bitter End

Archie died in Europe in the last days of the War, taking a bullet for the chief. He didn't know.

Jena knew; she lived long enough that she couldn't not have noticed and besides, she took a personal interest in his body. She died at forty-three, sealed in a vault and suffocated. He was with her; he survived, of course. She was still beautiful when she died.

After that... I've watched them come and go. Most of them died young. I kept going, and so did he.

I'm old now. My body hurts and it leaks and he... He's still the same. Still young. Still so damned beautiful. 

God rot him. He's like a vampire, sucking the life out of us; out of them. I don't know why I'm immune to it; why I'm still alive when everyone else is dead. Maybe it's because I'm immune to his charms. 

Well... resistant. I'm not saying we never danced, although it's been a long time now. With anyone.

I'll be dead soon. I was a nurse, I am a doctor, I know that my body is telling me time is almost up. He is fresh as a daisy.

I sit here, filling out the reports on the latest death, when it hits me.

If I knew how, I'd kill him myself.


End file.
